Should I use PhoneGap instead of ramping up on the Android SDK?

Question

Although I am comfortable with Java, I have much more experience with web development. I am looking to get into programming simple Android games.

Should I just program e

Answer 1

The biggest pro for phonegap is that it takes advantage of your web development experience. I think what most people seem to miss (or ignore) is that there is no advantage in avoiding phonegap for an android only application! You can still write as much native code as you want to, mixing and matching phonegap as you please.

I am writing an Android app that uses text to speech. Because Phonegap doesn't support this in their API, you might think that Phonegap is a bad choice, but actually it was quite easy to call the Java code I need from javascript:

Java code:

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
   //boilerplate and TTS set up
    ...
    this.appView.addJavascriptInterface(this.speak, "speak");
    ...
}

public void speak(String text) {
    this.tts.speak(text, TextToSpeech.QUEUE_FLUSH, null);
}

Javascript code:

speak.say("hello world");

Answer 2

Pros for Phonegap:

• deploys to all major mobile devices
• sounds like it best fits your skillset
• covers most available platform APIs with a uniform code base, no need to learn each one
• PhoneGap Build (https://build.phonegap.com/) and Cordova (https://github.com/brianleroux/Cordova) are making it even easier to deploy to multiple platforms

Pros for Android:

• Better performance
• No limitations on which APIs you can use (i.e., video)
• Defined toolset and workflow
• native UI components
• Fragments API and native layouts make handling different screen sizes easier

It really comes down to whether or not you want to be an Android-only developer or not. That first pro for phonegap is HUGE is you plan to develop for multiple platforms.

Answer 3

I personally have major concerns over PhoneGap apps performance compared to that of a native Android app. The admittedly small amount of testing that I have done makes the PhoneGap version feel very unresponsive compared to native. I don't see how this doesn't translate to a poor user experience. Even PhoneGaps packaged sample application runs poorly.

I was very excited at the possibilities that PhoneGap appeared to open up, but I don't feel like it's there yet. I don't feel comfortable committing to a large project on PhoneGap.

Answer 4

No WAY! Adobe has their cloud build which has a 9.5 MB file size limit. And, they are discontinuing support for other types of build.

Answer 5

I have just spent the past week or so developing a simple Android app using PhoneGap. My great hope was to be able to recommend this product for use in our department as a "write-once, deploy everywhere solution."

In practice, it was more complicated than I would have hoped. I did manage to get an Android version of the app done, but I found a lot of quirks in using basic stuff like getting it to include css and the jquery mobile framework. I kept thinking that this was just my learning curve but a lot of the tutorials I found online were outdated and didn't work in the version I downloaded. The biggest surprise was that you can't link to external documents without using a plugin such as childBrowser, which is a huge drawback.

I tried today to port my app over to iOS and could not get past step one with importing css. I couldn't find any support documentation on this basic step. It's frustrating because this is a simple app that I could craft as native in Xcode in a day or so. It looks like it will take me a lot longer using PhoneGap.

PhoneGap looks really promising, but at the moment I don't want to use it. It's just a question of time. Why would I want to take twice as long on something? It might be a better choice in future versions